For Hegel, truth is not so much the opposite of error as the result of it.
The cunning of Reason lies in the fact that our blunders and oversights, did we but know it, have already been reckoned into account by truth itself, as the very process by which it is achieved.
Truth looks like an end-product, but turns out to encompass the whole process of trial and error which led up to it. When we are able to look back and understand that those misrecognitions were essential to the whole enterprise, this is the moment of truth or Absolute Idea.
Similarly, when the the person underer analysis is able to free herself from the illusion that there is some truth quite separate from the business of transference, some transcendental knowledge of which the analyst has possession, then for the Lacanians and Zizeks she is en route to a cure.
Zizek illustrates the point with the story of a man faking insanity in order to escape conscription, whose ‘psychosis’ takes the form of rummaging obsessively through a pile of documents saying, ‘That’s not it, that’s not it!’ When the doctors, convinced by this frenetic performance, finally present him with a certificate of exemption, he exclaims: ‘That’s it!’
What looked like the result of his behaviour was actually the cause of it, and this reversal of cause and effect is a staple of psychoanalytic theory which Zizek expounds – as he expounds everything else – with extraordinary brio and élan.
The cunning of Reason lies in the fact that our blunders and oversights, did we but know it, have already been reckoned into account by truth itself, as the very process by which it is achieved.
Truth looks like an end-product, but turns out to encompass the whole process of trial and error which led up to it. When we are able to look back and understand that those misrecognitions were essential to the whole enterprise, this is the moment of truth or Absolute Idea.
Similarly, when the the person underer analysis is able to free herself from the illusion that there is some truth quite separate from the business of transference, some transcendental knowledge of which the analyst has possession, then for the Lacanians and Zizeks she is en route to a cure.
Zizek illustrates the point with the story of a man faking insanity in order to escape conscription, whose ‘psychosis’ takes the form of rummaging obsessively through a pile of documents saying, ‘That’s not it, that’s not it!’ When the doctors, convinced by this frenetic performance, finally present him with a certificate of exemption, he exclaims: ‘That’s it!’
What looked like the result of his behaviour was actually the cause of it, and this reversal of cause and effect is a staple of psychoanalytic theory which Zizek expounds – as he expounds everything else – with extraordinary brio and élan.
Terry Eagleton http://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n23/terry-eagleton/enjoy
- The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters by Slavoj Žižek
Verso, 248 pp, £40.00, January 1997, ISBN 1 85984 094 9 - The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of The World by Slavoj Žižek and F.W.J. Von Schelling
Michigan, 182 pp, £35.00, July 1997, ISBN 0 472 09652 4 - The Plague of Fantasies by Slavoj Žižek
Verso, 248 pp, £40.00, November 1997, ISBN 0 85984 857 4
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